I don’t know how to put this politely, so I’ll just come out and say it: Fuck Star Wars.
Everyone from Lyft drivers to random strangers has asked, “Do you have tickets to see The Force Awakens?” And then inevitably, “Why don’t you have tickets to The Force Awakens yet?”
But hey, at least the first trilogy’s got some chintzy B-movie charm and a semicompelling love triangle between the three lead actors, not to mention a transcendent, dryly humorous performance from Harrison Ford as the roguish space pilot. The prequels, everyone seems to agree, are a pile of CGI-enhanced horseshit—a hundred tedious conversations about intergalactic diplomacy mixed with a central romance more robotic than C3PO and Jake Lloyd screaming “Weee!” while Jar Jar is a-sayin’ a-somethin’ brain dead.
Attend one of a growing number of comic book conventions and you find that it all feels like a cult-y cheerleading section for conspicuous consumption of whatever movie/TV show/video game is being sold to them. Actor Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty in the Abrams-directed Star Trek movies, briefly bit the geeky hand that feeds him by writing an essay on his blog this summer describing what happened when this self-infantilizing “nerd culture” conquered the universe.
And then there’s Disney—an emperor in mouse’s clothing. After buying the Star Wars intellectual property for an ungodly amount from the creatively exhausted Lucas, the company shifted the shameless selling of the franchise into light speed. The Force Awakens is only the beginning—Disney is planning on releasing a new movie every year until every ounce of joy in the originals has been thoroughly milked for profit. They’ve even broken ground on new Star Wars areas in their already-sprawling theme parks in Anaheim and Orlando. Jean Baudillard would be infinitely amused. In Simulacra and Simulation, the French postmodern theorist called the original Disney theme park “a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization.”
